I started this blog under my real name.\u00a0 It seemed like the thing to do at the time.\u00a0 In November of 09 I hadn\u2019t quite made the decision to become a professional academic, let alone begun to process everything I was going to need to do to achieve that end.\u00a0 I was going to school, yes, but \u2026 I still thought of myself more as a jeweler than anything else.\u00a0 As a jeweler, practicing magic in a city where I have an established base of power, I have nothing to hide.<\/p>\n
But now I\u2019m moving, and I have academic politics to think about.\u00a0 The people where I\u2019m going don\u2019t know me, and I don\u2019t know them.\u00a0 And when I finish my Bachelor\u2019s degree, I\u2019ll be moving on to another school where I\u2019ll have to rebuild my reputation from the ground up again.\u00a0 (And, of course, there\u2019s the whole angle where I might just join the war<\/a>.)\u00a0 Having this come up when you search my real name might be inadvisable.<\/p>\n My career as an occult author is, at best, years off.\u00a0 Until then it seems prudent to adopt a pen name.\u00a0 I will not name the school I am attending, or the town I live in \u2013 though anyone willing to websearch the details I do give will no doubt be able to put two and two together.\u00a0 I don\u2019t need a secret identity \u2026 just plausible deniability.\u00a0 As such, I would ask friends who know me in the real world to post comments here on the blog, rather than on my facebook \u2013 as an added bonus, our resulting conversations will be better preserved for posterity.<\/p>\n Allow me, then, to reintroduce myself: I am Satyr Magos.\u00a0 I have been studying witchcraft since 1993 and practicing since 1996.\u00a0 I am deeply eclectic \u2013 the kind who can lecture you for hours on the schools of thought I\u2019ve studied to get to where I am.\u00a0 Although I do not think of myself as Wiccan, many of my rituals are based in that framework.\u00a0 At the moment, I would describe my practice as Helenistic neo-Wiccan shamanic witchcraft.\u00a0 I am, for the moment, the one and only Initiate<\/a> of the Obsidian Dream.<\/p>\n For the first two-thirds of my life, I was an angry agnostic and my magic was largely theoretical \u2013 personal shields and house wards and tarot and playing magical tag.\u00a0 In 2007, shortly before my life in St. Louis failed utterly, I began making offerings to Dionisos, Hephaestos, and Apollon.\u00a0 The first two took me in readily; Rhea informed me of her presence in 2009.\u00a0 I am still negotiating with Apollo \u2013 and now with Athena and Hermes, as I more seriously devote myself to school.\u00a0 <\/p>\n At the same time I began working with gods, I also began to study shamanic techniques: a friend of mine took me on my first journey to the underworld.\u00a0 I read Penczak\u2019s Shamanic Temple<\/em> \u2026 but it was Michael Harner\u2019s Way of the Shaman that actually got me somewhere.<\/p>\n I put off studying ceremonial and Chaos magic for most of my life.\u00a0 There was too much penis-waving and too many invocations of a god I don\u2019t trust in the former; the second, as I\u2019ve mentioned elsewhere, gave me flashbacks to playing D&D in high school with that older friend who never moved out of his parents basement.\u00a0 I am dedicating the next year<\/a> of my magical life to filling those holes in my magical education.\u00a0 In the process I aim to develop a daily practice, and master the skills needed to aid other witches with their spells, potions, and rites of passage.<\/p>\n Welcome, again, to my blog.\u00a0 When I started it, I never imagined that I would have over a hundred pageviews in a month.\u00a0 Thank you all for coming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started this blog under my real name.\u00a0 It seemed like the thing to do at the time.\u00a0 In November of 09 I hadn\u2019t quite made the decision to become a professional academic, let alone begun to process everything I was going to need to do to achieve that end.\u00a0 I was going to school, … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[250,258],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-site-maintenance","tag-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1P","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}